Corporal Ted Smout

12:01AM BST 12 Jul 2004

Corporal Ted Smout, who has died in Brisbane aged 106, was one of the last six survivors of the 416,809 Australians in the Great War.

In September 1915, Smout lied about his age to volunteer for the Australian Imperial Force, moved more by the pressure of young Brisbane women handing out white feathers than by the call of King and Empire. He was big for his age - 17 years and eight months - and conscious that most of his mates had already gone.

Smout applied for the artillery, but found himself in the Australian Army Medical Corps and, in 1916, in France with the 3rd sanitary section, a 27-strong specialist unit. Attached to the 15th battalion, he had to find safe sources of drinking water, make health checks, and help with vaccinations, first aid, stretcher-bearing and much else. It provided as grim a view of war as any.

At Passchendaele in late 1917, with the unit at rest, he was bombed and buried in bricks, and thought his end had come. For many others, it had. His lasting legacy of this and other experiences was a nervous condition which was attributed to shell-shock, and which manifested itself after his return to Australia and dogged him thereafter. In his 100th year, when he was chosen as Brisbane's citizen of the year, he went to ground at the first shot of an artillery salute.

He served also at Armentieres, Messines, and Ypres; on the Amiens front and in the advance to Peronne and the Hindenburg line. But Passchendaele, with the bomb, the mud, the great rats and all-pervading lice, he found the worst.

When, soon after Passchendaele, Billy Hughes's Australian government tried, and for the second time failed, to win a national plebiscite to extend conscription to overseas service, Smout, like the majority of Australian servicemen overseas, voted "No". He didn't want to serve with men who did not want to volunteer.

With the Armistice, Corporal Smout drank himself silly, then cut loose from the French village where he was stationed, and headed for Paris. There he spent 10 days at parties and the Folies Bergere and other delights before a British military policeman spotted him. The escapade cost him 14 days' pay. He thought that harsh, but said later that as the paymaster of his unit he was able to reimburse himself.

Edward David Smout was older than the Australian nation, having been born at Brisbane in the colony of Queensland on January 5 1898, three years before the Australian colonies federated. His father, a collector of customs, was English. Young Smout was a bright student, a scholarship winner, and when he enlisted was a clerk, studying accountancy, in the state auditor-general's office. He found it difficult to take up civil life again after the war, and to settle his nerves went to the Cunnamulla district, 600 miles west of Brisbane, and familiar from his childhood, to work unpaid as a jackaroo.

In Brisbane again, he decided to go further and acquire two social graces that he had forever found beyond him. Having always considered that anyone who could stand up and sing socially deserved a VC, he took singing lessons for six months. Then, having been too nervous ever to ask a strange girl to dance, he spent six months learning to dance properly. The treatment did not prove a complete success, but it helped.

He went on to make a valuable life and to his surprise to win official recognition of his wartime service. He visited France in 1993 for the 75th anniversary of the end of the Great War, and again five years later to be created Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. In 1997 he had appeared in the BBC's 26-part television documentary, People's Century, and was said to be the sole Australian in the programme.

An accountant, Smout retired in 1962 as a senior executive in the insurance industry. In 1974 he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to the community through organisations which included Meals on Wheels, Legacy (a body caring for families of deceased servicemen and women), the Red Cross, Rotary, and the scout and guide movements. He was a president of the Australian Game Fishing Association.

He was a warm man, and humorous, though not about war. To the end, he maintained his vigorous opposition to all wars, opposing the dispatch of Australian troops to Iraq. His concern for political and social issues seemed undiminished by age. Australia, he believed, had enough natural resources to be a great country, but it needed to be about sharing and giving, "not about what you can get for nothing". He warned of social dislocation and of self-interest taking over from mateship.

Having weighed the Republican issue for a long time, he embraced it wholeheartedly after an incident with a customs officer at Heathrow Airport while returning from France with three other veterans, in 1998. The search alarm sounded - touched off, they said, by their medals - and they thought it an insult when the officer proceeded to check their persons. Thereafter he lent his name to the republican cause, and somewhat to his amusement was made a life member of the movement in 2002.

Smout had half-hoped to be the very last Australian survivor of the Great War. Perhaps this would have come to pass if, before his 105th birthday, his grandfather clock had not fallen on him while he was resetting its weights. He was pinned for 20 minutes before he could seek help, and lost much blood.

Ted Smout died on the anniversary of his wedding, on June 22 1923, and was given a state funeral. His wife, Ella, died in 1992, aged 91, and he is survived by two sons and a daughter.